Grounded, NFL-Style

The Cincinnati Bengals attempted only 9 passes in last week’s game against the Browns. This is only the 14th time since passing rules were liberalized in 1978 that an NFL team has attempted fewer than 10 passes in a game. Needless to say, most of these games were played in poor conditions and/or featured terrible quarterbacks.

At least two NFL teams did not attempt an official pass in a game – the Steelers against the Los Angeles Rams on November 13, 1949 (with the players “wallowing like water buffalos in mud as thick as paste” [New York Times]) and the Browns against the Eagles on December 3, 1950 (played in a hard rain). The Browns actually completed a pass, but it was nullified by an illegal motion penalty.

A potentially controversial sequence of events occurred late in the second half of the Packers-Falcons game when it appeared that two different players possibly threw punches that could’ve have warranted ejections.